I think the answer is that we can try to provide equal quality for all students, and that we should do that. At least in an ideal world that would be true. But even if we did, that would not guarantee that students would have equal results because the best predictor of early educational performance remains 'family background' where kids from more educated/richer/more resourced backgrounds perform better than kids not so advantaged. So the slightly perverse answer is that educational equality in teaching will probably result in unequal outcomes. If you want equal outcomes, you really have to give the disadvantaged students more help, and better teaching.

Every Stage has Specific Method

I think the answer is that we can try to provide equal quality for all students, and that we should do that. At least in an ideal world that would be true. But even if we did, that would not guarantee that students would have equal results because the best predictor of early educational performance remains 'family background' where kids from more educated/richer/more resourced backgrounds perform better than kids not so advantaged. So the slightly perverse answer is that educational equality in teaching will probably result in unequal outcomes. If you want equal outcomes, you really have to give the disadvantaged students more help, and better teaching.

@ Dag Bennett

Thank you very much for adding the dimension of "equal outcomes" on which we should also look at along with equal quality of education.

Suresh Chandra Murmu I support the view of Dag Bennett and would like to ad that I think there are great resources to find in developing pupils ability to facilitate each others learning processes. The challenge is often to get the privileged part of the population to actually believe that this can be mutually beneficial and that it can be a way to improve society for all members. Norwegian researchers claim that the positive Norwegian economical development is even more due to giving equal possibilities to all members of the society than many years of successful production of oil. Oil is important, but for instance facilitating women's rights to education and work, has been tremendously important for Norway's economical development the last 50 years.

Can is difficult but it must be tried

@ Kjartan Skogly Kversoy

I agree with you on the challenges to initiate the activity on equal quality education. And thank you very much for giving the example of positive Norwegian economic development.

Thank you Abdelkader Mohamed Elsayed and A. K. Mishra for your participation. I believe that though "can" is difficult but it is not impossible.

Suresh Chandra Murmu yes we should try to provide equal quality education for all, how can we do this? This can be done if the Government invest in building more public schools, monitoring schools and develop the skill set of the teachers who educate children up to age 14. I would also recommend that education up to age 14 be free or heavily subsidized so as to ensure access to all. The government could ensure that they spend much time on curriculum development of public schools and ensure that the resources are available within the public school system, I would recommend that the government forge private-public partnership so has to help in the pooling of funds to buy resources to run these early education programmes. Ensure that communities with low economic status have access to quality education, one way to do this is to zone schools and ensure that within every zone, schools are equipped with the required resources to carry out the business of proper education. Along with zoning, I would recommend the development of a National Education Policy, so as to ensure that all schools function the same no matter their location. Then appoint a committee to track and ensure accountability within each zone I recommend the creation of a post for Education Officers, these officers would have the responsibility to monitor schools within different regions and ensure that they are operating at the national standard and report to the National Education Committee. Principals and teachers with these schools should be provided with a detail evaluation instrument, which is designed in keeping with the National Educational Policy document, it would be wise to ensure that these principals and teachers' evaluation is reviewed also by a committee on a quarterly or yearly basis just as to ensure accountability across all zones and to ensure that the standards are constant across all the zones. A model very similar to the one explained above exists in the Small Island State Jamaica, it is important to note that it is not perfect, however, it is a good attempt at ensuring equal quality education for all.

A teacher must be able to do learning on the basis of quality assurance. Service quality assurance, namely the existence of competency standard-based planning, implementation, and evaluation. Competency standards as a guarantee of the quality of the learning process to be able to provide guarantees to students at the age of 14 years have the ability of cognitive, affective and psychomotor.

@Nicole Dean - Perkins

Thank you very much for important inputs. You have mentioned a structure/model which can be fruitful to provide equal quality education.

@Tuti Suartini

I are absolutely right that teachers quality and competency is important in terms of quality teaching.

@ Tuti Suartini

Error correction: You are absolutely right that teachers quality and competency is important in terms of quality teaching.

It is widely accepted that educational opportunities for children ought to be equal. Education significantly influences a person’s life chances in terms of labor market success, preparation for democratic citizenship, and general human flourishing; and second, that children’s life chances should not be fixed by certain morally arbitrary circumstances of their birth such as their social class, race, and gender. But the precise meaning of, and implications for, the ideal of equality of educational opportunity is the subject of substantial disagreement (Jencks; 1988).

Definitely, Government can implement same syllabus irrespective of individual board.

In my opinion it's difficult , but the educational equality it can give us more good results .

What we need to do is to give every child a strong foundation on which to build a career on. So, FIRST - Just check the meaning of 'education' before talking about equality etc etc: Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include storytelling, discussion, teaching, training, and directed research. ... In most regions, education is compulsory up to a certain age.

If we agree on this we can then go back to foundation and see what the community (not just parents) need to do to provide that.

This a very difficult thing to do, for instance we teach differently to boys than girls for instance. Facilitating one students learning may not be the same for another since the micro and macro fields of their lives are all different - its a highly complex environment and only when teachers identify these realms, can we hope to provide better learning environments together with ways to inspire learning.

@ Koduvayur Chandran

Thanks for giving meaning of education and educational methods.

To an extent, curriculum and quality of teaching are sought to be made "uniform" by having a syllabus and making teacher education programmes mandatory through a bachelor's degree (B.Ed). Of course, as you have pointed out in your question, the variance would still exist across different models such as state schools, central schools, schools that opt for an international programme and so on.

However, using digital platforms and encouraging good teachers and expert academicians to come on these platforms and share their expertise, the quality of learning for the student community can be greatly improved. This would also bridge the language gap since pan India, one can find scholars from different regions in premier institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science, universities of Mysore and Madras and Delhi, Fergusson College, etc. Their lectures, specially recorded for school students, can be broadcast on television channels dedicated to education, which are available in India, and they can also be uploaded on YouTube, made available for download through various websites, and so on.

Another solution is to have more public libraries, especially in geographically disadvantaged localities and rural areas, and stock them with excellent, peer reviewed literature and classic textbooks in order to make reading material readily available to students.

I hope this answer is helpful. Nevertheless, I share your concern about the great divergence in the quality of schools, teaching and infrastructure. It may not be possible to make everything "uniform", though the gaps can be sought to be bridged through suitable interventions.

@ Revati Kumaran

I completely agree with you. Thanks for the suggestions.

The general answer to the question is "no".

1. K-12 teaching is less an academic process than a nurturing process.

2. K-12 teaching success is far more dependent upon the quality of the students than the quality of the teachers.

3. K-12 teachers are not very committed to the value of scientific research; they are very committed to the myth that all children can be equally successfully educated. I personally think that this is how it should be. 

4. When teachers becomes education professors, they bring with them both the myth and the aversion to disclosing truth through use of scientific methods. To the extent that they are able to identify and nurture college students who already have the personal traits that are needed to be a successful teacher, they earn their pay. 

5. The traits and skills that are shared by successful K-12 teachers and collegiate teacher trainers have little value in the traditional duty of academia to discover new academic truth.

6. To the extent that government adopts and applies the K-12 educators’ commitment to the myth, government creates school “reform” schemes that do not produce improvement. Educators seek to help children by making schools better. They are like the hammer that sees every problems as a nail. That does not work. It has consistently failed since at least the passage of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965.

7. Children succeed (or fail) in school mostly because of their out-of-school lives, especially during the 50,000 hours between conception and the first day of kindergarten. Their success during the 14,000 hours of their K-12 classroom hours is a function of the quality of 91 percent of each childhood that is spent somewhere other than in school.

8. If we want to help more children succeed in school, we must do something to actually improve the quality of their out-of-school lives. If children are well-raised, teachers can teach them. If not, not.

Woah!!!! As someone who spent 10 years in public school classrooms (first grade through 8th grade) and the rest of my professional career (about 50 years) in teacher education with a focus on language including literacy development with an inquiry and holistic perspective it is difficult to read that kids succeed and fail based on their out-of-school lives.

I believe strongly that the strength of American democracy and the growth of the middle class comes from the opportunities available in public education schools (kindergarten through university) in the U.S. I grew up in a poor home in inner city Cleveland, Ohio with immigrant parents who did not speak English well. My mother worked at home and my father was a junk peddler who drove first horses and then his truck through the streets of Cleveland calling out "paper and rags" throughout my elementary and secondary school years. My parents wanted me to do well in school and supported me as well as they could but it was my teachers and my own excitement about learning that were the forces that were most important in my wanting to be a teachers to follow in my older sister's footsteps.

Teachers excited me about learning, encouraged me to use the public library and participate in their summer reading programs. I did also have a few teachers who were not very supportive: one told me to go back to Russia where I came from and the other two let me know that a bilingual student could not

possibly take geometry that I needed to go to a university. My educational history is too long to go into here.

Good teachers make strong impact and leave powerful influences on the lives of their students. Good teachers are those who develop curricula in their classes that involve reading and writing (literacy) in authentic ways to engage students to explore important ideas, ask critical questions and keep searching for meaning in our lives and what happens to others in the world. Good teachers know their field of study and the students they teach. The know them from their own excitement about learning about subject matter but also as they come to understand the development and backgrounds of their students. Most important they know how to engage their students in learning; how to support their students' interests and get them exited about solving problems of importance. I've written books about how students learn to read which I have studied extensively through miscue analysis and my writings include ways in which teachers involve students in authentic learning experiences as the center of their curriculum.

Test scores on standardized tests have never helped professional educators to know students to personalize their curriculum. Knowledgeable and experienced teachers know their students through careful observation of how students learn across time and they know how to discover ways to organize an exciting learning environment (the curriculum) for their students. And no standardized curriculum can provide such an environment. I have spent a lot of times observing such teachers. I need to end by saying that the best opportunities for such teaching to occur is in a school with other teachers and an administrator(s) who work together as a faculty to to establish the experiences and opportunities for such learning to be taking place throughout the school.

I agree with Yetta Goodman and thank her for sharing her life story, which many like me share, especially in India, the only country I know well. A teacher who can invest personal interest in her/ his students and bring passion to their job can make all the difference to the way a young person shapes up. While a family's help and the cultural capital it equips a child with cannot be discounted, there are examples aplenty both of persons who have frittered away this cultural capital and of those who have transcended the lack of such a good start in life.

I think that every students to get equal quality education is difficult but we must create opportunities to get equal quality education by collaborating with cummumity.

I think every student should get equal rights of Education according to our constitution, but still many of them are not able to get Education due to their financial status. Society also can play a key role, but some time lack of knowledge and financial support students become deprived from their right.

Financial status really should not be an issue if educational quality is on equal levels across educational institutions. Therefore, instead of creating a model infrastructure, why not help elevate the existing quality of lower-tiered educational institutions.

Yes, we can provide equal educational opportunities up to age 14. In Nigeria for example, there is equal, free and compulsory education for all children up to age 09 years. The resources are there, it only needs prudent allocation and utilisation of the resources particularly financial.

In an African context, it may be difficult to provide equal quality of education given that institutions have differences in their financial muscles. In fact in Zimbabwe the answer is 'No' basing on the fact that parents, schools, infrastructure, facilities and even educators for each institution differ. There are many reasons that contribute to these differences. Largely differences are created due to the financial muscle of the environment within which the institution is located. Those that have always have more advantages of being exposed to quality education than those that do not have. This actually creates barriers in thinking that education can be equalised because some communities dictate the type of product they want from what their schools should teach making it difficult to match them when they are in different places.

Yes we can. What is needed is to have one common model of education. As long as we continue having different models,children from rich families will continue enjoying good facilities and quality education and the poor will remain in ' education shambles'.

Of course we can....

What we need to have as a society is a priority for educational funding and development for every person in the U.S.

And we need to consider that adult education should also be considered in the priority. When adults expand on their educational opportunities it influences whole families including children.

I am a Professor Emerita who has spent my life understand language processes including learning to read and write as well as how teachers support students' learning through a rich curriculum for all.

It is possible to provide Quality education to children up to 14 years. The focus of education provision at this level is to provide interactive pedagogy, protect the children through creation of safety environment/classrooms.

The education system in Indonesia before or at the age of 14 years was given the same education, namely junior high school. Primary school education from 7-13 years old and junior high school education 13-14 years old.